


Heart and fist and human voice

by cicak



Category: due South
Genre: F/M, Fraser just longs to give it up, M/M, Obey kink, Orders, Pregnancy Kink, Submission, or to be understood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 22:48:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2445998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His first appraisal at the Depot put in writing what had been whispered about him from the first moment his ears pricked up and his shoulders relaxed in basic training - that Benton Fraser was good at following orders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart and fist and human voice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deputychairman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deputychairman/gifts).



> Title from 'We Will Still Need a Song' by Hawksley Workman
> 
> A million, billion thanks to loreleyluna for cheerleading.

His first appraisal at the Depot put in writing what had been whispered about him from the first moment his ears pricked up and his shoulders relaxed in basic training - that Benton Fraser was good at following orders.

In actuality, orders were simple. He found them strangely calming, giving refuge to a busy mind that buzzed with the possibilities of everything. Up to that point in his life everything had been a suggestion, a ‘Benton, would you please’ or ‘Son, why don’t you’ or ‘Be a love Benton, and -’. At the Depot he realised that the simplicity of following the rules was as important to a part of him as it is important to give boundaries and meaning in a civil and just society, and to allow that society to work.

The police service isn’t like the military, and despite what was spat at him occasionally, Fraser knew he wasn’t the kind of person who would have succeeded in the army. He needed the choice, not an illusion or a safety net to hide behind. Orders could be calming, could be peaceful, but if one thing came out of Benton Fraser’s unorthodox upbringing, it was that he was his own man, with his own mind. If he followed an order, it was because, secretly, he wanted to.

 

* * *

 

It was dark and there was a chill off the lake that he had not prepared himself for. The great lakes are larger than some seas, and they would never let you forget it if you were stupid enough to go near one without a coat.

He did not have a coat, because Ray had asked him to punch him, and he had forgotten, in his distraction and dismay to bring one. Ray had asked him to meet him after hours to assuage his own guilt, to settle their skirmish before it devolved into a war and razed the cities, redrew the borders, paid reparations to loved ones. Ray wanted to underline everything, to formally end their partnership, as unlikely and strange as it was. Fraser would punch him as payback, and that would be that. They would be a footnote in each other’s lives, relegated to stories and disconnected threads of feelings.

 

The tension between them that had been building slowly for months, that hadn’t even felt like it had been building until suddenly Ray wasn’t snarking back and instead starting sniping. The tension that had replaced all the mortar between their bricks with crumbling ashes. That tension shattered like he’d hit a mirror instead of flesh and bone as he did as he was told.

 

Ray cradled his face out of reflex and looked at him, hurt and resigned, like he hadn’t _explicitly asked for it, consented to it, demanded it for his honour_. Something in Fraser broke, something tiny and crucial, perhaps one of the small bones in the ear that control balance, and he stepped close and chastely kissed the red mark on Ray’s face that would surely bruise. It was a dry kiss, a winter kiss, unprepared and spoke of the promise of snow and wind chill and a bit of regret.

In that moment, because of the tenderness in it, there was a new feeling growing through the cracks in broken anger, but instead of bitter cold it felt like spring.

 

* * *

 

It was weird to feel such a way about a kiss, especially a kiss so chaste, because he had kissed many people since arriving in Chicago. Many more people than he had kissed back in Canada, but possibly the population density had something to do with it. It was the quantity and the quality of the kissing, and all associated physical forms of affection that seemed to be an American habit. Perhaps the old British prejudice about oversexed Americans was true.

 

He had kissed the real Ray Vecchio hundreds of times, their easy camaraderie underlined by mutual respect and attraction and what Fraser considered to be a form of gentlemen’s agreement. It was all very grown up and beautiful and unlike any previous sexual relationship Fraser had ever entered into prior to crossing the border, and mostly involved having sex in Ray’s big old fashioned dark wood bed and on Fraser’s strange Canadian blankets in his threadbare apartment. Ray’s bedding was couture and had more threads per inch than seemed physically possible, meanwhile Fraser’s aforementioned blankets were surprisingly soft despite looking like they’d been used as horse blankets for a couple of decades.

Their relationship was sweet and passionate, and Ray had referred to it as their ‘mutual understanding’ with a smile and a flirt and did things like take him home to meet his mother and lean closely so Fraser could scent him to let him know he was aroused, and called him on Mr. Mustafi’s phone to say things that would have made its owner throw the phone out of the window - but it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t a real, romantic relationship. Their assignations were quiet and silent and Fraser mostly closed his eyes or stared unseeing at the ceiling when Ray sneaked into the spare room in his own mother’s house and fucked him (so well, with his whole body and his so-called ‘Italian passion’ putting a twist in his thrusts that made Fraser’s bones ache, but none of his _soul_ ) so as not to look at him and fall in love. Ray still flirted with women and kissed them and talked about getting married with a wistful look in his eye. So when Fraser’s longest held desire fell into his lap, Fraser slept with the promise of Victoria, and Ray was completely happy for him and then not at all happy for him, like Benny had somehow broken a rule by sleeping with her more than once.

 

He broke more rules by trying to run away with her, and while their relationship recovered and was restored as time went by, their former understanding that had previously underlined their relationship was proven to be nothing more than a fiction.

 

Victoria though, she looked straight through him as if knew him down to his bones. She knew that she had power over him, both emotionally and sexually. One of the things she had said to him was just that, that she knew him, and there was nothing for him to hide from and so instead he should trust her to give him what he needed. She also said things that sounded like orders, but within the bounds of the English language were just suggestions. Like how happy it would make her if he was to kneel in front of her, and he would gladly get splinters from his untreated floor for her as he hid himself under her skirt and learned how to make her come with just his mouth from the pressure of her well-manicured fingers in his hair. She loved to hold his wrists down until the bones ground against each other, and settle her weight where it was most distracting, either fully clothed and dangerously perched on his shins until they creaked and threatened to snap to make a point, or stripped naked and pressed, aroused, her sex right on his dick, so he could feel her wetness and warmth as intimate as fucking but not quite there yet, and then bite the soft fleshy part of his ear to punctuate the suggestions she made as to rhythm, speed, roll, pitch and yaw. She said she wanted him to fly, and then when he ran after her, it felt the same as the rush of a plane thundering down the runway towards takeoff.

 

Where Victoria took away his actual choice but left the illusion, the Inspector, with her perfect city manners and her abrasive manner, wielded her power like a heavy sword, slightly uncontrolled but still deadly. She had a habit of ordering him to do things she didn’t really want him to do, but asking him to do the things she did. It made his head spin in a way he hadn’t experienced before.

Over time, he developed what would probably be considered a Pavlovian reaction to her orders, the fact that they always were tied to an emotional response, rather than a managerial reflex. They kissed on top of a speeding train talking about feelings, which while thrilling at the time. It was easy, all in the line of duty, expected of him, at the end of the day a request by means of body language and leading questions, but her ordering him to forget about it, to never speak of it again, it was that that he replayed in his head as he pulled himself off for weeks after.

 

When she proposed that he help her have a baby, and it all ended up being a big misunderstanding (even though that is what she had said, and how was he, her subordinate, to help her to adopt without some kind of subterfuge), he had been hoping ever so slightly that maybe, just maybe, she had meant it. That she would order him to inseminate her, possibly for months on end, if it didn’t work at first. Maybe she would put a note in her calendar around the days when she was ovulating, ask Turnbull to hold her calls, and then take him into the Queen’s bedroom, or ask him to lie on her desk and order him to make it good, because female orgasm improves conception rates. Maybe some days she’d just ask him to fill a vial, and do the deed in private after inspecting his technique, making sure he got every drop out and into the little jar. Maybe they’d have a little dark haired girl they’d call Elizabeth that he’d never see apart from when dropping off official documents.

 

When it actually happened, she opened his door, well after she had left the office and the consulate doors were firmly locked. She carefully, quietly, turned the doorknob so it made no sound, then just poking her head around the jamb as if to spy on his sleeping form. He was reading on his little camp bed, the light dim enough to cast the whole room in long shadows. His father, thankfully, had gone out hunting in his eternal wilderness fantasy, and so the closet was silent.

 

She had been at an official gala at one of the more flashy embassies, the ones who had their own ballroom and proper security on one of Chicago’s main streets and not a converted normal residence nearer the suburbs than city hall. Her hair was curling against its owner’s best will, her dress was dark blue and was slit all the way up despite its appropriate demurity, and she had a high colour to her face that spoke of dutch courage and her natural Canadian fortitude.

She ordered him to call her Meg, ordered him to strip for her out of his long underwear, and then proceeded to traumatise Dief with the aggressive creak of the camp bed as she rode him through three of her own orgasms and one of his own.

 

A month later she rushed past him as he stood outside like a stuffed frog counting specks of dust in the late afternoon light clutching a plain bag of the sort used by the pharmacy three streets over, and then later shook her head at him sadly when he came off shift and inside to change, and then locked herself in her office for the rest of the day. She was extra frosty at him for the next month, but never came to him at night again.

 

* * *

 

Where all his other significant relationships were with people who claimed to know him, to have solved the great riddle of Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski was baffled, incredulous and impatient. He had been quick to anger because Fraser was the Rubik’s Cube of relationships in his mind, always liable to change if the whole thing was spun around, but then Fraser kissed him by the docks, then gave him air to save his life, acted like a superhero, then snapped back to his normal self, butter very much not melting and the status quo seemingly restored, smiles all round. The new tension, that soft springtime feeling of fresh breeze blowing out all the cobwebs, was blooming now, with no closure in sight.

 

The secret though, was that everything was infused with this new tension, that built through the weeks and months into something that felt as dangerous as the anger that had preceded it. Fraser deeply hoped that everyone who had picked up on the old tension couldn’t feel the new one, because he could barely cope with it as a secret.

 

There was pizza with fruit on, and Ray had had a couple of beers and there had even been hockey on the television, a safe match of two US teams but not involving the hawks, so neither of them were particularly invested. Perhaps it was the utter familiarity of the night that lulled them both into a sense of security, made the whole state of their relationship seem normal before it caught them off guard. The air went weird, like all of the hairs on the back of Fraser’s neck rose up in primitive reaction to danger or an electrical storm.

 

Ray stood in the break, and came back from the kitchen with his third beer, but didn’t sit down. He paced, taking small sips for courage or something to occupy his hands and mouth. Then he stopped pacing and stood casually, but a feigned casual pose, one hand on his hip, cocked and ready to either fight or fuck.

 

“Are you going to kiss me, Frase?” Ray said, quietly, “or am I just going to need to go crazy watching you and convincing myself that I had hallucinated the whole thing?”

 

Fraser felt his face go pinched for a moment, an involuntary movement he couldn’t resist if he tried, then he sighed and stood up.

They were at an impasse. They both stood on either side of the cliff, waiting to jump.

 

“If you want something so badly, Ray, why don’t you ask for it?” he heard himself say.

 

The silence between them was deafening. Then Ray looked him dead in the eye, and said “Kiss me, Frase”, voice steady and without even a crack, and Fraser had him against the wall in half a heartbeat.

 

“I don’t understand you, Frase”, Ray said, lips millimeters away, his back arched into all the planes and angles of Fraser’s body like a puzzle piece.

Just before he leaned in to kiss him, Fraser smiled, so broadly that their lips touched prematurely, jumping the gun, and whispered “I think you understand me just fine”.

**Author's Note:**

> ...and then they had lots of sex and lived happily ever after that I ended up not writing but I WILL ONE DAY.
> 
>  
> 
> [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com)


End file.
